EA - EA Culture and Causes: Less is More by Allen Bell

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EA Culture and Causes: Less is More, published by Allen Bell on August 16, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Should there be a community around EA? Should EA aim to be one coherent movement? I believe in the basic EA values and think they are important values to strive for. However, I think that EA’s current way of self-organizing – as a community and an umbrella for many causes – is not well suited to optimizing for these values. In this post I will argue that there are substantial costs to being a community (as opposed to being “just” a movement or a collection of organizations). Separately, I will argue that EA has naturally grown in scope for the past ten years (without much pruning), and that now may be a good time to restructure. In the following sections I will explore (potential) negative facets of EA as a community and as a large umbrella of causes: If the community aspect of EA becomes too dominant, then we will find ourselves with cult-like problems, such as: the incentive for people to stay in the community being stronger than the incentive to be truth-seeking. Currently, EA’s goal is very broad: “do good better”. Originally, colloquially it meant something fairly specific: when considering where to donate, keep in mind that some (traditional) charities save much more QALYs per dollar than others. However, over the past ten years the objects of charity EA covers have vastly grown in scope e.g. animals and future beings (also see a and b). We should beware that we don't reach a point where EA is so broad (in values) that the main thing two EAs have in common is some kind of vibe: ‘we have similar intellectual aesthetics’ and ‘we belong to the same group’, rather than ‘we’re actually aiming for the same things’. EA shouldn't be some giant fraternity with EA slogans as its mottos, but should be goal-oriented. I think most of these issues would go away if we: De-emphasize the community aspect Narrow the scope of EA, for example into: A movement focusing on doing traditional charities better; and an independent Incubator of neglected but important causes 1. Too Much Emphasis on Community In this section I will argue that a) EA is not good as a community and b) being a community is bad for EA. That is, there are high costs associated with self-organizing as a community. The arguments are independent, so the costs you associate with each argument should be added up to get a lower bound for the total cost of organizing as a community. Problems with Ideological Communities in General The EA-community is bad in the sense that any X-community is bad. EA in itself is good. Community in itself is good. However, fusing an idea to a community is often bad. Groups of people can lie anywhere on the spectrum of purpose vs people. On one extreme you have movements or organizations that have a purpose and people coordinating to make it happen. Think of a political movement with one narrow, urgent purpose. People in this movement form an alliance because they want the same outcome, but they don’t have to personally like each other. On the other end of the extreme you have villages, in which people support each other but don’t feel the urge to be on the same page as their neighbor ideologically. (They may find the guy who cares a lot about X a weirdo, but they accept him as one of them.) For an unexpected example, consider the Esperanto community. This community was founded on an idea, but today it is very much at the community end of the spectrum rather than the ideological one. Both extremes (main focus on ideology/purpose or on community/people) can be healthy. However, combining ideology with community tends to lead to dysfunctional dynamics. The ideology component takes a hit because people sacrifice epistemics and goal-directedness for harmony. At the same time, the ...